Stoke City have had a fair few controversial players on their books over the years and maybe none more so than Guinean striker Sammy Bangoura.
The Potters were stuck in a rut in the Championship in the mid-2000s, and their Icelandic owners had overseen some key changes prior to the 2005/06 season, with boss Tony Pulis sacked and replaced by Dutch manager Johan Boskamp.
Boskamp oversaw the arrival of numerous overseas players, such as Carl Hoefkens, Hannes Sigurdsson, and Martin Kolar, but it wasn’t until deadline day that Stoke forked out a club-record fee of £950,000 for then 23-year-old Bangoura from Belgian club Standard Liege.
He got off to a strong start with the Potters as they chased promotion, but things soon went wrong for him at the club after he went off to represent his nation at the African Cup of Nations.
Sammy Bangoura failed to turn up to Stoke training after AFCON
Bangoura had been a consistent scorer in the Belgian First Division with Lokeren and Standard Liege, but he had to bide his time with Stoke as he waited two months for his work permit to be granted and then was arrested at East Midlands Airport in the process of moving.
He soon had his charges dropped, however, and was able to feature for the Potters.
The Guinean bagged on his first start at the Britannia Stadium in a 2-0 win over Crewe Alexandra, and soon went on a great goal-scoring run, with seven goals in six games in the lead-up to Christmas to win the Championship’s Player of the Month award for November.
He had been a regular for his country since his international debut in 2000, so left Stoke in mid-January to play in the African Cup of Nations in Egypt, and led Guinea to a quarter-final defeat against Senegal before he was supposed to report back in the Potteries ahead of the club’s February 4 visit of Preston North End.
Bangoura, however, was a no-show at the training ground, and he had still not turned up by February 9, after his agent had claimed that he had been the subject of a £2.75m bid from an unnamed Russian club.
Stoke chairman Gunnar Gislason duly turned down the bid for his star man, which boss Boskamp was pleased about, but the Dutchman had some strong words to say to the media regarding the 23-year-old’s disappearance after he still failed to turn up following the club’s 3-0 loss to Cardiff City on February 11.
“It is three times more than we paid for him a few months ago, but the main thing is we want to keep him,” Boskamp told the Stoke Sentinel.
“I drove past his house on Tuesday night and the lights were on, so I don’t understand (why he hasn’t appeared at training).
“He knows he should have been here last Tuesday.
“If I was a player, not a manager, I would kick him in his b******s. I’ve no respect for him.”
Bangoura finally appeared nine days after he was supposed to, and was fined two weeks for his no-show as teammate Clint Hill claimed that he “owes us a big one,” after the Potters had failed to score in four games in his absence.
He was unable to rediscover his impressive exploits in front of goal though, and scored just once in 10 appearances before the end of the season, as Stoke finished 13th, and Tony Pulis was re-hired as manager by new owner Peter Coates.
Bangoura continued to be a controversial figure at Stoke before his exit
The Guinean was handed a second chance at Stoke, with his decent record in his first six months at the club enough to convince the Potters that he deserved his place in the squad for the 2006/07 season.
| Sammy Bangoura 2005/06 Stoke statistics | |
|---|---|
| Appearances | 25 |
| Starts | 24 |
| Goals | 9 |
| Stats as per Transfermarkt | |
That faith was not repaid, however, and he managed to turn up 37 days late for pre-season under Pulis, as he only appeared the day before Stoke’s season-opener against Southend United and claimed that his delay was due to his young daughter’s passport issues.
Stoke had stopped paying Bangoura’s wages during that time, but his agent, Alfred Raoul, insisted that “he wants to play for Stoke,” and he did make another four appearances for the club before joining FC Brussels on a six-month loan in January 2007 in the hope of more game-time.
The Guinean returned to the Potteries at the end of his loan spell but had no chance of getting back into Pulis’ squad ahead of the likes of Ricardo Fuller, Mamady Sidibe or new signing Richard Cresswell.
He signed for Portuguese club Boavista for a fee of £270,000 in August 2007, bringing a turbulent two-year spell at Stoke to a relatively uneventful end, but was still branded a “disgrace” by chairman Coates for his mishaps that had cost the club a fair amount of potential fees for a sale, and Bangoura himself the potential chance to play at the highest level.
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